At Risk wg-1

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Of course, it’s a blessing he was here. Providence, your guardian angel, living right, whatever,” he indelicately, indifferently goes on. “Win got pissed and came to see you. As it turns out, my little ploy actually did us all quite a favor. You’re still alive, Monique.”

  “Don’t sound so disappointed.”

  “Monique…”

  “I’m not joking.” She holds his gaze, doesn’t flinch, realizes she has come to hate him, to wish him harm, misery, poverty, death. Then, “I don’t want Toby coming back. He’s worthless. I’m done with that favor. I’m done with any favors.”

  “He can’t stand working for you anyway.”

  “I’ve had enough of you, Jessie. I have for a long time.” The vodka is making her uninhibited. He can go to hell. “I told you I’m not playing along with it anymore. I goddamn meant it. It’s not worth it.”

  “Of course it is. You’ve gotten what you want, Monique. What you deserve,” he says, and there is no mistaking what he means.

  She stares at him, shocked. “What I deserve?”

  He stares back at her.

  “I deserve that? You’re saying I deserve that! You bastard!”

  “I meant you work hard, should get something for it.” His eyes don’t jump around this time. They look at her, flat, nothing in them.

  She starts to cry.

  It is dark now,the moon new.

  Win opens the driver’s door of Nana’s old Buick, stopped in the middle of the road again, watching Miss Dog wandering aimlessly again, headlights flashing in her old, blind eyes.

  “That’s it. The end,” Win says, furious. “Come here, girl,” he coaxes, whistling. “Come on, Miss Dog. What’cha doing on the street again, huh? She forget to shut the door? Let you out, her fat ass too lazy to make sure you got back in? Her son-in-law lowlife kick you again?”

  Miss Dog’s tail droops, her head hangs. She drops to her belly as if she’s done something wrong. Win gently picks her up, keeps talking, wonders if she can hear him at all, places her inside the car, drives off, tells her where she’s going and what will happen next. Maybe she hears him, maybe she doesn’t. She licks his hand. He parks behind Nana’s house, and the wind chimes are chiming softly, the night clear, the cool air barely stirring, the chimes quietly chiming as if telling secrets, and he unlocks the back door, Miss Dog draped over his shoulder like a furry sack of potatoes.

  “Nana?”

  He follows the sound of the TV.

  “Nana? We have a new addition to the family.”

  * * *

  Sykes has been on the phone for more than an hour, getting bounced from one old-timer to the next. Twenty-three years ago is forever. So far, no one at the Asheville Police Department remembers Detective Mark Holland.

  She dials another number as she drives west toward Knoxville, approaching headlights confusing her, reminding her what a rip-off it is to get old. She can’t see worth crap anymore, can’t read a menu without glasses, her night vision awful. Damn airlines. Damn delays and cancellations. The only rental car left, one with four cylinders, got the pep of a sea cow.

  “I’m trying to reach Detective Jones,” she tells the man who answers the phone.

  “Been quite awhile since I was called that,” the voice pleasantly says. “And who’s this?”

  She introduces herself, says, “As I understand it, sir, you were a detective with the Asheville PD back in the eighties, and I’m wondering if you might remember another detective named Mark Holland.”

  “Not well because he’d only been a detective a couple of months when he got killed.”

  “What do you remember about that?”

  “Only he’d gone to Charlotte supposedly to interview some witness in a robbery case. You want to know my opinion, he wasn’t no accident. I think he just didn’t want to take his own life in a place where one of us would have had to work his case.”

  “You have any idea why he might have wanted to take his own life?”

  “The way I heard it, his wife was cheating on him,” he says.

  * * *

  Nana is asleep on the couch, in her long, black robe, her long, white hair loose and splayed over the cushion, Clint Eastwood on the TV, making somebody’s day with his big, bad gun.

  Win sets down Miss Dog and she instantly puts her head in Nana’s lap. Animals always react to her like that. She opens her eyes, looks at Win, holds out her hands to him.

  “My darling.” She kisses his face.

  “You didn’t have your alarm on again. So I have no choice but to give you a guard dog. This is Miss Dog.”

  “Welcome my friend Miss Dog.” She pets her, gently pulls on her ears. “Don’t you worry, Miss Dog. She won’t find you here. That nasty woman, I can see her plain as day, could use a few teeth, couldn’t she.” Petting Miss Dog. “Don’t you worry, my little one,” Nana says indignantly. “I have ways of taking care of people like her.”

  If you want to incur Nana’s wrath, treat an animal badly, incite her to go out on one of her mysterious missions late at night, flinging 999 pennies into a bad person’s yard, a payment to the old crone goddess Hecate, who knows how to take care of cruel people.

  Miss Dog is fast asleep in Nana’s lap.

  “Her hips are hurting,” she says. “Arthritis. Gum problems, pain. Depressed. She yells at her a lot, that big, unhappy woman, not a nice person, treats her the same way she treats herself. Terrible. Poor baby.” Petting her as she snores. “I know all about it,” she then says to Win. “It’s all over TV, but you’re all right.” She takes his hand. “You remember that time your father beat up that man who lived three streets over?” She points. “He had no choice.”

  Win isn’t sure he knows what she’s talking about, nothing new. Her world isn’t always obvious or logical.

  “You were four and this man’s son — he was eight — shoved you to the ground and started kicking you, calling you awful names, calling your father awful names, racist names, and oh, when your father found out, he went to their house and that was that.”

  “Did Dad start it?”

  “Not your father. But he ended it. It happens. And you’re all right. If you go back and look around, you’ll find a knife.”

  “No, Nana. It was a gun.”

  “There’s a knife. You know, the kind with a handle that’s got a thing.” She draws it in the air. Maybe she means a knife with a guard, like a dagger. “You look. The one you killed, and you mustn’t blame yourself for that. He was very bad, but there’s another one. He’s worse. Evil. I tried the honey on a muffin this morning. Tennessee is a pure place with lots of good people, not necessarily good politics, but good people. The bees don’t care about politics so they like it there, are joyful making their honey.”

  Win laughs, gets up. “I think I’m going to head down to North Carolina, Nana.”

  “Not yet. You have unfinished business here.”

  “Will you please set the burglar alarm?”

  “I have my wind chimes. And Miss Dog,” she says. “Tonight the moon is aligned with Venus, has entered Scorpio. Misconceptions abound, my darling. Your perceptions are veiled, but that’s all about to change. Go back to her house and you’ll find what I’m talking about and something else.” She stares off, says, “Why am I seeing a small room with rafters overhead? And a narrow staircase, maybe plywood?”

  “Probably because I still haven’t gotten around to cleaning out your attic,” he says.

  11

  The next morning Sykes and the director of NFA, Tom, are squatting, moving through the grass like crabs, picking up brass.

  On the Knoxville Police Department firing range, no one is above picking up after himself, and everyone is expected to live up to the privilege of attending the Academy. Showing up for class goes without saying. Sykes is sleep-deprived and depressed as she glances around at her classmates, fifteen men and women in blue cargo pants, polo shirts, and caps, returning firearms and ammo to the golf cart, finishing up an
eight o’clock session of analyzing trajectories, cartridge case ejections, marking evidence with tiny orange flags and taking photographs like they do at crime scenes.

  Sykes is humiliated, dejected, certain the other students are shunning her, have no respect for her. The way it must look to them, she’s a fair-weather crime scene investigator, turns up when there’s something fun going on like firing the AK-47, the Glock, the 12- gauge riot gun, blasting away at what she calls the ugly bastard targets, her favorite because it is far more gratifying to rip into a paper thug pointing a pistol at her than to go for a bull’s-eye. She clinks several brass cartridge cases into the plastic bucket she and Tom share, the air humid and heavy, the distant Smoky Mountains hazy, living up to their name.

  “So far it’s not making the Knoxville PD look good.” She is trying to explain, sweat running into her eyes.

  “Yesterday was blunt-force and pattern injuries,” Tom says, clinking in another cartridge case.

  “Kind of funny,” she says, parting grass, plucking out more brass. “That’s what killed her. Blunt force.” Clink. “And she had pattern injuries.” Clink. “Win says she had holes punched in her skull, like maybe somebody went after her with a hammer.” Clink. “So I’m learning about it anyway, even if I missed class.”

  “You’ve missed drug-abuse deaths. SIDS. Child abuse,” Tom goes on, moving through the grass, clinking more brass into the bucket.

  “You know I’ll make it up.” She’s not sure she can and Win isn’t here to help her.

  “You’ve got to.” Tom gets to his feet, stretches his back, his young face serious, maybe more serious than he really feels.

  He’s not the hardhead he pretends to be. Sykes knows. She’s seen him with his kids.

  “What about the PD, exactly,” he then says.

  She explains about Jimmy Barber’s basement, about a case file that should never have been taken home and now is missing, tells him about what is seeming like an incredibly careless and inept investigation of an incredibly vicious murder. She’s a bit dramatic, emphatic, hoping he’ll understand the importance of what she’s doing instead of focusing on what she’s not doing.

  “I don’t want to make anybody look bad,” she says. “And if I just drop all this and walk away…? If Win and I do?”

  “Don’t make excuses for him. He can answer for himself. If we ever see him again. And it’s his case, Sykes. His department put him on it.”

  It may be his case, but that’s not how it’s feeling. Seems to her she’s doing all the work.

  “And the KPD isn’t going to look bad. That was a long time ago, Sykes. Law enforcement has changed dramatically in the past twenty years. Back then all they had was ID techs, nothing like this.” He looks around at his students.

  “Well, I don’t think I can turn my back on it and walk away,” she says.

  “Our Academy students don’t turn their backs and walk away from anything,” Tom says, almost kindly. “Tell you what. Tomorrow’s gunshot wounds, we’ll be working with a couple ballistic gelatin dummies.”

  “Well, hell.” She likes shooting up jelly men, as she calls them, even more than the ugly bastard targets.

  “Not as crucial as some other things, I can let it slide, find some time later to get you back out on the range. But all next week is bloodstain-pattern analysis. That you can’t miss.”

  She takes off her dark blue cap, wipes the sweat off her brow, watches the other students walking off toward the field house, toward the trucks, toward their futures.

  “I’ll give you until Monday,” he says.

  * * *

  “Nothing,” Win announces as he creaks down the creaking wooden stairs, remembering how loud they sounded only a few early mornings ago, when his entire life changed.

  “I told you. We really did play detective and look around after the fact,” Sammy says from a wing chair near a fireplace covered with a stained-glass screen. “No other areas of the house were involved. It fits with what she said. He came in behind her, forced her up to the bedroom, and that was it, thanks to you.”

  “That wasn’t it, unfortunately.” Win looks around.

  Lamont’s glass fetish doesn’t end in her office. Win has never seen anything quite like it. Every light fixture is the same kind he shattered in her bedroom, an exotic half moon suspended from a hammered iron chain, hand-painted in vivid colors, signed Ulla Darni, expensive as hell. Her dining-room table is glass, and there are crystal bowls and figurines, art glass mirrors and vases everywhere.

  “You know what I’m saying.” Sammy gets up slowly, sighs, as if he’s too tired to move. “Man oh man. I need a new back. You satisfied? Can we go now?”

  “She’s got a garage,” Win reminds him.

  “Already been in there. Nothing.”

  “I haven’t been in there.”

  “Whatever you want,” Sammy says, shrugging, and out the door they go.

  In the late eighteen-hundreds, it was a carriage house, brick, a slate roof, now a bit tired and half hidden by the low branches of an old oak tree. Sammy finds the key to the side door, realizes the lock is broken, has been pried open.

  “It wasn’t like this when I was here….” Sammy slides out his gun. Win’s already got his out.

  Sammy shoves the door open and it bangs against the inside wall, and he lowers his pistol, returns it to its holster. Win lowers his .357, stands just inside the door, looking around, noticing oil stains on concrete, noticing dirty tire tracks, what he would expect inside a garage. Hanging from Peg-Boards are the usual yard and garden tools, and in a corner is a lawn mower, a wheelbarrow, and a plastic gallon gas can, half full.

  “Doesn’t look like the gas can came from in here,” Sammy remarks.

  “Never thought it did,” Win replies. “You plan on torching a place, usually you bring your own accelerants.”

  “Unless it’s an inside job, like a domestic situation. Seen my share of those.”

  “That’s not what this is. Roger Baptista sure as hell wasn’t a domestic situation,” Win says, looking at a rope hanging from the exposed beam ceiling, a pull-down ladder.

  “You already check?” Win asks.

  Sammy looks up where Win is looking and says, “No.”

  * * *

  The windows of the imposing Tudor home glint in the sun, the Tennessee River bright blue and gracefully bending in either direction as far as Sykes can see. She climbs out of her old VW Rabbit, figures she looks like a harmless, middle-aged Realtor in a denim pants suit.

  The businessman who owns the house where Vivian Finlay was murdered isn’t in, Sykes checked, wonders if anyone has bothered to tell him that twenty years ago a seventy-three-year-old woman was beaten to death inside his ritzy house. If he was told, he must not care. That’s something. Sykes wouldn’t live in a place where someone was murdered, not even if it was given to her. She starts walking around, wondering how Mrs. Finlay’s killer got in.

  There’s the front door, and on both sides of the house plenty of windows, but they’re small, and it’s hard for her to imagine someone climbing through a window in the middle of this neighborhood in the middle of the day. Another door closer to the back of the house appears to lead into the basement, then facing the river is one more door, and through windows on either side of it is a handsome modern kitchen with stainless-steel appliances and lots of tiles and granite.

  Sykes stands in the backyard, taking in the flowers and lush trees, the low wall built of river rock, then the dock and the water. She watches a motorboat roaring past, pulling a hotdog skier, calls a number she stored in her cell phone as she was driving over here after an Academy class that might be the last one she ever attends.

  “Sequoyah Hills Country Club,” a polite voice answers.

  “The business office, please,” Sykes says, and the call is transferred, then, “Missy? Hi. Special Agent Delma Sykes again.”

  “Well, I can tell you this much,” Missy says. “Vivian Finlay was a member from
April 1972 until October 1985…”

  “October? She died in August,” Sykes interrupts.

  “October was probably when her family got around to canceling her membership. These things can take awhile, you know, people don’t even think about it.”

  Sykes feels stupid. What does she know about country clubs or memberships of any type?

  “Had a full membership,” Missy is explaining, “meaning it included tennis and golf.”

  “What else you got in that file?” Sykes asks, sitting on the wall, wishing she could look at water without trespassing or going on vacation. Must be something to have so much money you can help yourself to a river.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I mean, old itemized bills that might give some details as to what she bought and did, maybe? For instance, if she ever bought tennis clothes in the pro shop?”

  “We don’t throw away business files, but they wouldn’t be here in the office. We have a storage facility….”

  “I need her old bills, all of them for ’eighty-five.”

  “My word, twenty years’ worth to dig through. That could take…” Dismay, an audible sigh.

  “I’ll help you look,” Sykes says.

  * * *

  The upper story of Lamont’s garage has been converted into a guest room that doesn’t appear to have been used except for the indentations and a little dirt left by feet walking around the dark brown carpet. Fairly big feet, Win notes. Two different tread patterns.

  The walls are painted beige and hung with several signed prints — sailboats, seascapes. There is a single bed covered with a brown spread, a bedside table, a small dresser, a swivel chair, and a desk that has nothing on it except an ink blotter, a green glass lamp, and a brass letter opener that looks like a dagger. The furniture is inexpensive maple. A small bathroom with a stacked washer-dryer, very neat and clean, looks unlived-in, except, of course, for the footwear indentations all over the carpet.

  “What you got up there?” Sammy yells from the bottom of the pull-down plywood stairs. “Want me to come up?”